Extract from the Introduction:
In selecting as his theme for this play the sending of West Indians to relieve the Farm Labour Shortage in the U.S.A., the author would have preferred to use Guianese instead of Jamaican labour, in which case the title would have been Demerara Dan and not Jamaica Joe. However in 1946 we had not yet started sending Guianese farm labourers to the USA. The author was actually tempted to publish the play now under the title Demarara Dan with the necessary alterations. The time factor made this awkward: e.g. the reference to the Duke of Windsor, then Governor of the Bahamas, would have had to be omitted. The author has decided to let the play stand as the literary effort of a Guianese author in the year 1946. The sentiments expressed in the play are near enough to home, e.g., working towards self-government, deciding to return to one’s country and help build it or to remain in a foreign country and build oneself, insurance of crops against flood or drought.
Norman Eustace Cameron was born in New Amsterdam, Guyana. He attended Queen's CollegeQueen's College in Georgetown, and in 1921 won the Guyana Scholarship, achieving First Class Honours at the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Examination, with five distinctions in Latin, French, English, Mathematics and Religious Knowledge, placing him first among candidates from Barbados and Guyana. (...) On returning to Guyana he founded his own school, The Guyanese Academy (1926–1934), and wrote The Evolution of the Negro[1] in two volumes.
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